It was ten months later that
Constantine Rudman realized that there should be some sort of logical
connection between the instant Senator Naipaul began to garrote Elizabeth,
and the morning after when all the survivors of the apotheosis of the saints
woke up in their beds in their relatively good health. When he told
Vanessa about this, she kicked him in the shins, and said that she had noticed
something wrong two months ago, and she had tried to tell him about it, but he
was too busy badgering and begging her for sex, so she gave in just so to get
that petty grimace off his face and that awful whine out of her ears.

They had been living together since April: once it was clear that Elizabeth
was not coming back to her apartment, Vanessa asked Lucian to be her new
roommate. She agreed, and Constantine
often dropped by to visit. After he stayed over too many nights, and
convalesced too many mornings after, Vanessa decided that Lucian should go back
to her own apartment and Constantine
move in with her. At the time Constantine
recognized that something very strange had happened that December evening, he
had just finished his doctorate, and had converted to Judaism. He
immediately proposed to Vanessa, who, to everyone's surprise, eagerly
agreed. She had just finished her own studies, and both of them seemed to
be destined for boring and mediocre careers in academe. But, also to
everyone's surprise, some of the stories that they had written had actually gotten
published, and they could seriously consider a career as professional writers.

Everyone, even Vanessa's parents, thought they made a very poor couple.
Although their political and religious and literary views were very similar the
two were always arguing in public on these and many other matters. Constantine's
increasing tendency to dizzy spells, to have long coughing fits and general
bouts of weakness, did not make him an impressive figure, while Vanessa was so
argumentative and caustic she interrupted the rabbi marrying them three times
to tell him not to be so trite. And even their friends found them cold,
stand-offish and elitist, and wondered why they had so many friends in the
first place.

The
other survivors of the Cathedral of St. Michael Servetus remembered even less
about that Saturday night in December. And no one remembered less than
Thomas Edward Harding, who returned to his office in the House of Commons on
Monday morning, and, for some strange impulse of curiosity, decided to open the
master box of dreams in his bookcase. There was nothing inside, even the
dust had decayed away, and Harding never dreamed again. To his surprise
he found that Dramsheet and Monagham were launching an investigation into his
role in the death of Pr. Hermann. The inquiry never reached the papers,
but to everyone's surprise, Harding lost his seat at the next election.
He could not understand all that had happened to him, and when he died shortly
after, he had no idea that he had done anything wrong.

The
children of Ignatius Wilentz M.P., and John Seinkewicz, M.P., were considerably
more fortunate than Harding and Concrete's, but that does not mean that they
simply lived happily ever after. Quite the contrary, they lived very
complicatedly happily ever after. A few days after her arrival in Ottawa,
Natasha was so upset at how wretched Philippe Roget was, so confused and
helpless after being expelled from the Flannery O'Connor Brigade, that she
married him. This did wonders in restoring Roget's sanity and moral
decorum, but it did leave open the obvious problem of bigamy. Natasha
however successfully argued that as a Catholic, Roget could be not divorced
according to canon law, and she also argued that because the Roman Catholic
Church accepted the privileges of the Canadian state over civil marriage, they
could not object to her marrying Giles. She then argued, that as a Jew,
it was perfectly proper for her to have more than one spouse. True,
polygamy had been abolished in the Ashkenazi tradition for a millennium, but it
had not been quite abolished in the Sephardic tradition. True, she had
been born, educated and bat-mitzvahed entirely in the Ashkenazi tradition, but
she had received enough education in the Sephardic one to temporarily qualify
as one. True, even the Sephardic tradition said that only men could have
more than one spouse, but Natasha argued that the Sephardic tradition clearly
stated that rabbis could have more than one spouse, and she had both the
literary and magical knowledge to become a Sephardic rabbi, which she proved by
briefly turning the chief rabbi of Israel
into a six-foot tall kosher parakeet. Wisely, this was one case that Louis
Dramsheet did not assist her with, but everything turned all right in the
end. Roget continued his brilliant medical career, and Giles was rescued
from the job that was so very boring, even I've forgotten it, and dabbled in
politics, numismatics and literary criticism. Natasha was a charming
hostess, and soon the possessor of half a dozen doctorates. She worked
hard at carrying out her father's not-exactly dying wish to have Nietzsche's
books made part of the Talmud, and she soon became pregnant. She would
become pregnant several more times, and Giles was so confused as to whether he
was the father or Roget, and whether he was the father or the unfather, and
even whether it was Natasha who was pregnant, or whether it was either he or
Philippe, because she occasionally let them carry the embryo while she had to
go to some special conference that he had no choice but to love all the
children equally with all the strength and power that he had, and so everything
turned out very well. Evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists were
very skeptical. But they were also very envious.

As
for Inspector Cheryl Monagham, formerly vice-inspector Monagham, she soon
married the man who delivered the doughnuts to the police station. He
was, in fact, a stupid, boorish and insensitive man and he even forced her to
give up her job, thereby cutting the family income 60%, and he poisoned and
stifled her in a thousand ways. But she deluded herself into thinking she
was happy, and so she was.

The
Flannery O'Connor Brigade survived this debacle far faster than it had any
right to, since it was after all an international organization with branches in
every country. Madame Vovelle retired a few years later, letting Pandora
take over the Canadian operations, where she worked with Lightfeathers, and
three other new Canadians, while Naipaul returned to Tanzania.
Madame Vovelle dedicated her twilight years to raising the six children of the
six showgirls impregnated by John Locke with the semen of St. Thomas
Aquinas. The six were all kind and wonderful and charming, and they all
became cardinals, even the girls. Pandora became involved in even more
bizarre machinations, which she informed her mother, and both of them were
disappointed that Aquilla married a very ordinary man, and lived a very ordinary
life. Genet Vovelle never became more than the number twenty-nine man in
his wife's life, and his eldest daughter never forgave his adulteries, until
the day many years in the future when she received a ruby from her cousin's
wife that reminded her of her maternal grandparents. After that she was
far more forgiving. As for the concept of mermaid soap, the Flannery
O'Connor Brigade tried its best, and the Siamese maid used it to conceive a
fourth child after her husband's affections began to wane. It worked
perfectly.

Eventually, of course, Adrian Verrall and Lucian Rudman did fall in love,
though it was always a very strange sort of affair, whose details need not
concern us, except that Lucian once tried to convince Adrian
that he was an unwed mother. As for Mrs. Concrete, she lost her seat in
the next election as well, but to her surprise, she found that Ignatius had
nominated her daughter, who was languishing in an asylum, to fill the position
that Mary Lightfeathers had abruptly left behind. After constant
education and the best psychoanalytical approaches, Elizabeth Concrete Harding
turned herself into a very different woman, who married a very different person
from her first husband. It was a long and arduous process, and it will
also not concern us here.

Since they were already rather old, Peter and Rebekah Wilentz retired as librarians
and had a fine old age, with their minds in fine fettle. They survived
the birth of their first grandchild by several years, and they died within
three hours of each other. When Peter came to look over the house after
the funeral, he was properly indignant that everything, except for a small box,
had been left to Vanessa. But then he heard the lawyer from the next room
calling to him, showing him what was in the box. The lawyer showed him an
enormous ruby, which Natasha had given Peter's parents the Purim after the
bloodpurge, and the lawyer eagerly told Peter that the ruby must be at least
three times the value of everything else they could have owned. He
gave Peter the ruby and left the room, and Peter was left alone to stare at
it. It certainly was a charming bauble, and perhaps it really was
valuable, but as Peter took a closer look at it he could not believe his eyes.
For in the center he saw images, saw reflections, saw a special light, and
Peter realized that he was looking at the lives of the sixteen brothers and
sisters he never had and had never wanted, and they somehow existed here in the
special ruby in all their complexity and vitality, and the longer he looked at
the ruby the more Peter realized that their lives were real lives, and were not
the less real for being confined to the ruby,that they were real souls, and not
simple images of obscure magicks or simply shadows before the mind of
God. And it was more than Peter could bear. He shut the box and
never opened it again, and he managed to wheedle Vanessa in giving him a third
of her inheritance. He put the money in a special secret Swiss bank
account at a real interest rate of 7.5%, but he never touched it, and it just
stood there and grew until two centuries later it was causing considerable
trouble with the world economy. Instead he went back to his work and
worked as a loyal and devout accountant for another twenty-five years; then he
retired, and then he died. But before he died he had dreams, beautiful
dreams, of being in love with his cousin.

As
for the Simrickys they still continued to live poor and not terribly happy
lives, but their lot did noticeably improve when one of Sarah's daughters
impulsively married an Arab Christian while vacationing in Cyprus.
After that, none of the fourteen Simricky's bones were ever broken again, and
they never had to worry about anvils falling from the sky. Meanwhile, Montserrat
became seriously underchallenged now that he no longer had to pump paraquat on
Peter's whims. He eventually joined another company, married an
attractive young woman, and deferred to the whims of his children far too
often.

It
would be nice to say that Ignatius Wilentz, Louis Dramsheet, John Seinkewicz
and Avare Roget Seinkewicz also lived happily ever after. And indeed,
Dramsheet went back to his work the next Monday with no problems, continued
writing his book on Cavafy, continued to be unable to find a publisher, and
still went on sea cruises, and still solved murder mysteries. But after
the bloodpurge he never dreamed again. Meanwhile Avare and John thought
that they should see a marriage counselor, and indeed they made wonderful
progress, because as the counselor was such a moralistic, fashionable, and
pompous prat, husband and wife had to cooperate very closely in gagging him so
that he would shut up. John was never hit again by a piece of rotten
fruit, and after Natasha had given both Philippe and Giles a child (though they
didn't know who was whose) she planned to give her mother-in-law a ruby much
like the one she had given her uncle. But before she could do any such
thing the affairs of Dramsheet, Seinkewicz and Wilentz came to a very abrupt
climax, which would be far too complicated to describe here, but will be fully
discussed in a future novel. Suffice to say, their fate was intimately
entwined with the decent Progressive Conservative M.P. Stuart Reyanaldes, who
represented the riding of Pseudo-Dorsetshire in the House of Commons, and let
it also be said that Avare was left in tears at the end of it all.

That only leaves Vivian Chelmnickon. What did he do after the climax of
his canonization service? Well, early Sunday morning he met John Seinkewicz's
assistant who, despite the fact that his employer had been severely injured by
a flying Watermelon, despite the deaths of Oliver Corpse and Joseph Tyrone, and
despite the complete absence of Vivian Chelmnickon for the previous forty-four
hours, had made wonderful progress in ensuring Mrs. Chelmnickon's burial.
Vivian then walked over to where Oliver Corpse was supposed to be buried, and
to his considerable anger he found that Corpse's coffin was in several pieces,
and his cold blue body was lying in a shallow grave. When he walked to
Oakeshott Funeral Homes he found it in complete chaos following the discovery
of the Assistant Funeral Director. Vivian confronted the director with his
clear negligence in Corpse's burial, and a long legal process was begun with
the eventual result that Corpse's body was returned to Poland,
his last will was cancelled, and the director had to return the $10,000
bribe. (And to make things even worse for the chastened director his
young apprentice ran off with the delivery girl from Brimelow Florists after
all.)

As
soon as he had buried his wife and his friend, Vivian abruptly resigned his
position at CarletonUniversity.
He wrote a few more essays, but he never taught again. It was he who knew
what had happened after Senator Naipaul began the garroting, and only Ignatius
Wilentz knew as well. For as Ignatius tried to explain to an
uncomprehending Dramsheet, there was only one reason why you want to kill
someone who was already dead, and that was because you could not kill that
person when she was alive. And there was only one reason why you would
belong to a conspiracy to kill someone who was already dead, and that was to
corrupt someone by making him kill someone who was already dead. And that was
the whole raison d'etre of the leaden angels, who were angels of the Lord yes,
but also angels of the Holy Prosecutor, Satan, or Shaitan, or the Prince of
Darkness, which was a misnomer, because he was always suffused with light and
he hated mankind because of the dark shadows that infected the human
heart. The Angels were tempters, yes, but the oddest thing was they had
not committed a sin, they had told no lies, they had merely conspired to
corrupt Vivian Chelmnickon into murdering his own wife, by offering him the
opportunity to execute Elizabeth Concrete. And that was why all the
angels were female, why three members of the Flannery O'Connor Brigade were
women, why an Indian woman baptized Elizabeth
into the church and why a black man tried to garrote her, so that in this
racially balanced execution, the murder of Vivian's own wife would not become
clear. And there was no objection to the conspiracy, since the Lord in
His infinite wisdom, allowed all evil and temptation. The angels had not
caused the bloodpurge, they simply knew that human muddling in the box of
dreams would make it inevitable. They had not tried to execute Elizabeth
Concrete, they merely let their servants go ahead with it.

Nor had they
ever lied: it was true that the lead on their wings was the result of the
corruption of this world, they simply failed to add that the force of pure love
would repel all impurity. Since humans rarely felt that sort of pure
love, and since they hardly needed to show love for their moral inferiors they
considered it irrelevant to add that improbable proviso. And they had not
lied when they said that their service would save Vivian Chelmnickon and ensure
his canonization: they simply failed to add that the only way to gain
salvation was to reject sainthood, and they also failed to add that salvation
was not that difficult to get, or that important to obtain. And they had
not lied when they said that Hermann had talked with the Holy Ghost: they
simply failed to add that the `Holy Ghost' was the pet name for the confused
and generous angel who assumed the role.

And
when he realized that it was not the grotesque sexuality of a foolish young
girl he was objecting to, but the sexuality of his own wife that he hated, and
when he realized that her sexuality implied his own, and how much bad faith
there was there, and when he realized that when he said he had washed his hands
of Elizabeth Concrete, he was condemning his own wife to death, and when he
realized that and much more, he rose from his place in the circle, and yelled
at the top of his voice, and he ripped off his robes and special signets and
all the other sings and symbols and threw away the sainthood. And there
was a great rush of wind and confusion, and then all the survivors were back in
their beds, and in good health, the Siamese official got all his blood back,
and Monagham's leg wounds vanished, because having failed, the leaden angels
had no wish to go any further or cause any harm. And all this Ignatius
told to his lawyer, who was too Catholic to understand it, and who simply
agreed to whatever he said, because he wasn't really interested.

But
despite having rejected a fiendishly clever and ingenious temptation Vivian
Chelmnickon was not happy. Instead he was unhappy, full of guilt, and
when he left Canada
he never returned to it, but he did not return to Poland
either, or even Britain.
There were enough anti-communists in Paris who requested his presence, but
after a few months their sycophancy grated on his nerves. But despite
this and despite the pleas of the Seinkewiczs and the Balcorewiczs he could not
leave, he realized he was trapped, a trap of suffering he had once cleverly
devised himself. He wrote fewer essays, going through the old books and
debates became more and more painful, and he spent more and more time writing
long letters in his Paris flat to
his many friends and admirers. As he approached the end of his life, the
pauses in his days grew longer and longer, so that in the last month of his
life the few weeks were longer than all his preceding years. In those
days, all he could do was brood, meander endlessly on a single theme, on how he
could have murdered his wife, and he always came up with the same answer, it
was all too easy, and all he could do was ruminate in pain on how he could be
so cruel. And as the final minutes slipped by like hours, days, weeks and
months, and years, he wondered how he could ever be forgiven for this and so
much more, until the final instant came, eight years, five months, and four
days after the bloodpurge, when he realized that too, was all too easy.

And
so ends the novel, except it doesn't, because Vanessa Wilentz and Constantine
Rudman lived beyond his death and lived a very different sort of life. At
once, objections can be raised. Constantine
hasn't done anything: he's weak and neurotic and self-pitying, and he even
needs Vanessa's help to write a story, which, however effective it might be in
getting women to sleep with you, is hardly an accurate model of artistic
creation. And where was the great moral test in the Cathedral of St.
Michael Servetus? Here was the perfect opportunity, (the devil's
advocate, no less!) to make a grand moral statement, to be a fine example of
character development, and he botches it! Why should he (and Vanessa)
live happily ever after, and live creative and fulfilling lives in the bargain?

It
certainly wasn't a perfect marriage: among other problems Constantine
was a very poor lover and perfectly capable of adapting some piece of
fashionable mawkishness in order to cover up his conduct. Vanessa never
fell for these outbursts of sentimentality, and as time went on she wondered
how the two of them could have sex without Constantine
spending the next six hours with a fever. So from time to time Vanessa
would surprise Constantine in his
university office (or perhaps she would surprise him when he visited her
university office) and before he could protest she would handcuff and blindfold
and handcuff him again, and in this bondage would seduce him in a skimpily clad
ugly whore's outfit with ludicrous stiletto high heels that he always hated, in
the hope that pure lust would prevent any inconvenient love. But there
was always some vestige of love hanging around, and it was in these perfectly
awkward poses that Constantine fell
ill the fastest, which meant that he would be too weak to remove the handcuffs
and get rid of the gag and help untie his feet together, which meant that
Vanessa would have to do it for him still dressed in that skimpy whore's
outfit, with ludicrous stiletto high heels, while there was someone knocking on
the office door, and the whole building was so cold that Vanessa would come
down with pneumonia as well. Even before he was thirty Constantine
was often so weak that he required a cane. Vanessa could not help but
consider her husband slightly ridiculous, but he had his revenge, of a sort,
because in contrast to the very innocuous pregnancies of her mother, or her
cousin, Vanessa's were extremely painful, and often her body was racked with
pain and agonies in the most unnecessary places. This did not prevent her
from doing her work, but she did have to rely heavily on Constantine's
help, who, after six months of enforced abstinence, was at the height of his
health.

And
so to everyone else they appeared as a querulous couple who by their thirties
had to wear large dowdy spectacles, with three very plain children who also had
to wear large dowdy spectacles. Political enemies called Vanessa
"Novelist most difficult to imagine pregnant" and called Constantine
a eunuch behind his back. And they had the annoying habit of getting into
the most byzantine arguments about the most irrelevant topics of the day, while
generally ignoring what other people might want to say, and sometimes being
downright rude in indicating their lack of interest in other people's
topics. And so almost everyone assumed that they would get divorced in a
few years time.

But
they never did. And it wasn't just the fact that they never argued about
money, or about who should be doing what domestic task, or that no-one else
would ever want to sleep with them. Because after all they did argue
about whether they should go to synagogue, or whether they should buy such and
such an object or what story they should publish or indeed whether they should
publish it at all or what book their children should be reading or what
television program they should be watching or how they should be dressed for
whatever ceremony. But although they always argued with obstinate
petulant muleheadedness, there was something very special in their petty
diatribes, as if their spite had been mixed with leftover holy hydrochloric
acid. It was clearly the only possible reason that Vanessa grew to like
her husband's incompetent sexuality, and not merely because his illnesses gave
her the perfect excuse for sick leave.

And
in their home they read. And argued. And they read not merely literature,
history, antiquities, and sciences, they read also about atrocities, and about
torture and censorship and arbitrary imprisonment and about the spreading
culture of euphemism and lies, and not only did they read about these
atrocities, they remembered, and they wrote letters and signed appeals and
circulated petitions and they translated books and they even translated light
vicarious works just to show that there was more to many cultures than an agony
of suffering and pain, and they wrote essays and they lobbied governments,
though with little success, and they taught their children all the atrocities,
just as they helped them read before they were four and made sure they read
everything else and knew how to play Mendelssohn and how to tolerate and enjoy
Wagner, and admire Pessoa, even if he was fond of Salazar and to play with
dreidels and cryptography and chess, and they only gave the victims what they
deserved, which was justice and memory, and they attacked everyone, from the
socialists who took eugenics seriously, to the liberals who advocated and
committed those crimes that were so horrible that only liberals could commit
them with a good conscience, to the countries that committed such crimes, or
that let them happen, or who didn't protest them when they could have, and they
were so outspoken about the cheap cant about Canada
being a "victim" of colonialism that they lost many friends, and they
read more and more from every literature and every language and learned every
language in order to translate it, as they raced against time against the
bloodpurge, though they couldn't race very well, because Constantine
desperately stumbled even with a cane and Vanessa's glasses were now
ludicrously thick, but race against the bloodpurge they did, against the blood
that cried out to heaven that stained and stunk everything like the
bloodstained Vermeers, and the Paradise Lost with the green smudges of Irish
intestines, and murdered Midianites and the architecture made of solid slave
laborer blood and the ever present pompousness and hypocrisy and euphemisms and
much more and soon their bedroom was a sea of notes for essays on Montale, on
Hagiwara and Agnon and Trakl and Gombrewicz and Appelfeld and Maghouz and
Adonis and Wen-I-To and Tosun and Asturias and Vallejo and Arguedas and Achebe
and many many more and never Margaret Atwood and their hands were smeared with
ink and Constantine had to stay in
bed all day after their children had all grown up, that eventually they never
got up to wash their hands, and they just read more books and wrote more essays
and had more sex in an orgy of love, knowledge, lust, fanatical learning,
idiotic passion, bad faith and guilt as they wondered what more they should do
and what more they should learn and what they had done wrong which they should
have done right, as their endless quarrelling became a prayer that was its own
answer, a sacrifice that was its own answer, as they never achieved peace of
mind or satisfaction or happiness since that was not the point but instead
continued to write more and read more and afterwards dictated more since
Vanessa went blind from reading too much with their whole skins the colour of
ink as they tried to help more people and learn about more people, and this was
right, because in a world like this, in a world this treacherous and cruel,
guilt and love were the only honorable ways to react to a world that had done
this to Jolanta Niemczyk Chelmnickon.